Sonata in C Minor

Description

Maria Herz – only in recent years has her name begun to be heard in the music world, so thoroughly had her work been forgotten due to a complicated fate in exile. Born in Cologne in 1878 and raised there as the child of an important Jewish textile merchant family, she was one of the few female composers who succeeded in carving out a place for herself in the male-dominated new music scene in Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, she had followed her husband, Albert Herz, to England to escape the anti-Semitic climate in Germany. In August 1914, the outbreak of the First World War prevented her return to England following a family visit to Cologne. She began a second career as a composer after further studies with Hermann Hans Wetzler and Philipp Jarnach. At the end of the 1920s, she entered the public eye with successful performances of orchestral works and songs – but the time until her forced second exile in England after the National Socialists seized power in 1933 was not enough for her to establish herself internationally. She fell silent as a composer and died in 1950 in New York, her third and last place of exile. The first edition of her works published by Boosey & Hawkes – Bote & Bock is being produced in cooperation with the composer’s descendants and the Central Library in Zürich, where her estate is kept. Maria Herz’ late romantic violin sonata, composed in 1909, was one of the works she wrote during her composition studies with the Leeds composer and organist Arthur Edmund Grimshaw between 1905 and 1910. A performance, which was probably the first performance, is documented in a portrait concert dedicated exclusively to works by the composer on December 12, 1911 in Bradford – a city in the north of England, not far from Leeds, where the young Herz family had settled. Lyrical soulfulness and great expressiveness are combined in this thoroughly successful journeyman’s piece with evidence of formal and compositional mastery.